Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This paper relies on social media data to analyze the drivers of euroscepticism in Eastern Europe. EU regional policies have focused on fostering mobility of the workforce by bringing people to places with high concentration of jobs, primarily in the capital cities. Such an approach contributed to the growth of center-periphery disparities, which has been larger in Eastern Europe than in other parts of EU. Recently, some of these countries, Hungary and Poland in particular, have also witnessed the rise of popular support for anti-EU parties. This phenomenon prompted a scholarly debate about the factors driving this outcome with some scholars emphasizing potential shifts in the underlying cleavage structure (Hooghe and Marks 2018, Linden and Pohlman 2003, Massetti and Schakel 2015, Pisciotta 2016, Rodríguez-Pose 2018), whereas others pointing to Russia’s information warfare (Benkova 2018, Bystrica 2018, Howard 2018, Pomerantsev 2015). Unlike previous studies that focused on electoral outcomes as the measure of support for the populist parties, this paper uses content analysis of geocoded twitter data from Poland and Hungary to compare center-periphery differences in the sentiments towards EU. This study advances this debate by using twitter data to test whether voters’ sentiments towards EU are shaped by the center-periphery cleavages or by exposure to the Russian online media.